From nothing: poems (1988-1992)
Translated by Andrew K. Davidson
Clouds Over the Block Opposite
I can’t make the compass needle move through concentration.
I tried. I can’t do it.
I can’t channel a playing card’s image. I tried.
I wanted to levitate and concentrated for half an hour
and I felt insane, lying on my back in an unmade bed, in a sweat.
I tried to make a woman look at me on the metro,
of course, she didn’t look.
Lord, I am not your chosen one!
The world doesn’t change for my mind.
I don’t love enough, don’t have enough faith.
I don’t have an aura around my head
and you haven’t shown yourself to me, haven’t given a sign.
I hold the tablecloth between my fingers:
not giving in, not rising in red steam.
I touch my little girl’s hair, the curls:
dark, golden, soft.
Nothing confounds my senses. There’s no illusion.
My mind is a smooth mirror of the world.
Smooth and flat.
There’s no scratch.
There’s no past life, no ectoplasmic creature.
There’s no Agartha, no Shambala
there’s no Maya, what comes in dreams
is only the maquillage of nothing.
I stare into the flame on the stove, hypnotized,
knowing I came in a uterus,
knowing I will go in a coffin or sully the earth with my blood.
It will not be me who finds the crack.
It will not be me with my head turned in the group photo.
My Dream Is a Tape Recorder
it only takes very little to be happy—
when I finished my meditations on infinity
when my delusions of grandeur dissolved
when the brand on my bones and necklace faded
when I suddenly stopped thinking of myself as
Jesus, Bob Dylan, Gauss and Vonnegut
(jr.) at the same time when
the word soon made sense to me
and I’ll say it again: when it seems
that clouds never take the shape of a guitar, lathe, carousel, coffee tin
slide ruler, collar bone or wisdom teeth,
when I realize I have no choice but to roam
hands in my pockets
among colors in ruins,
when I knew that I don’t think with my brain, and nothing depends on me
and I won’t stop there:
when I was forced to have an apartment and a job
but thought this life too meager for me
when I was stuffed with moles, benign tumors boring into me
when I read Dostoevsky without wincing
when I, the wondrous spectacle, stood in line at the store,
I thought I’d buy a reel-to-reel tape recorder,
Kashtan, two thousand dollars,
because I like listening to music the most
and I would so love to have such a nice thing
listening to me
often
leaving from school, I’d stop in the electronics stores
on Strada Doamna Ghica
and I saw the beautiful tape recorder I was promised
her cute, boxy figure
her gentle, smart reels
her flickering, green LEDs—
there, on display
between two delicate, black speakers
and now she is my dream, when all other dreams are gone.
ah her plexiglas, hypnotic reels
their uneven, lazy turns…
The Smell of Dry Leaves
the smell of dry leaves…
one time I had a gir-girlfriend…
I was in high school and for the sake of being weird
(I was a poet), I told her: you know what,
I see more colors than most other people,” and she,
M., would say: “well, you should
go see an ophthalmologist”, but truly,
not joking… the smell of
dried leaves being burnt in the Barbu Văcărescu’s yard
next to the police general inspectorate…
I decorated the autumn season with diamonds then: it seems
diamond, the girl with braided hair (or gloves?).
everything was diamond then
and if people were defecating
it’d be a diamond knocking around in the toilet or
if the trees keeping their leaves, they were necessarily
diamond.
I was writing poems and crying at the typewriter
but the women were inv-invented
and I didn’t know how to make love, I’d tried
and failed as a boy,
a jealous, angry boy… a member of the Monday literary circle…
a student…
it’s so nice to rub a girl between the thighs
bare and so, very human
not “woman”
and if you open the window when it’s autumn outside
its scent would enter: the lea-
the courtyards
of dry leaves and red fire tongues…
sex is completely ridiculous in books and movies—plotted
fucking-n-sucking
insanity
in real life, though, it’s sweet and sad
the bodies are behaved
there’s the fucking and it’s sucking, also
but for most
and most of the time
it’s different, it’s:
her calling me Meer-Meer
or, Mrr-Mrr when I’m cheap
in the elevator, after going out
when I grab her butt and snarl: “this is it,
you’re not getting away: I’m going to rape you!”, but she plays along:
“unhand me, sir, or I’ll knock you out!”
standing at the door
unlocking
discovering ourselves in a silly, little home
and everyone, everything else can go to hell…
and now, for the great maestro of finales
to offer the poem
the perfect, poetic finale:
“ah, the smell of burning leaves,
of the leaf burning in the courtyards,
of diamond leaf from the air with diamonds…”
from Air with Diamonds
Amor Poem
There was a lunar eclipse on tv, really stammering
the Sunday we were together, in a fluorescent bulb prison commiserating
commiserating, grinning, whining wrapped in Chinese Cherry wine, I was
burning gas and biting your neck, biting your jewelry, biting your reflection in the glass
and if you remember, we went to make crepes where coins clanked
on the kitchen window of the Dîmboviţa Mill for the ghosts of exterminated rats
and its silo was made of real brick, there was nothing metaphysical which excited you
and your breasts were emanating from you in the winter twilight
like they were vibrations in a children’s classroom over stationary and light bulb casings
there was nothing metaphysical, just tempered anxiety, a little screech of purple cellophane
in the sublingual hallways
there was a tap of two fingers on two poorly insulated wires
and in that lunatic kitchen you showed your clear, transparent self, like a two hundred
thousand carat gem
and I saw through to the digestive system
death.
I saw her leaning against the iron fence of the pulmonology clinic next to the general military
directorate
stopping a kid on the sidewalk, sending them for a newspaper or bread rolls
I saw death sending for a newspaper and bread rolls in the pinkest, most incomparable dusk
I saw her on the trolleybus dismal and decrepit, her paws in dirty, white-knit gloves
reaching for the crossbar at the front door
begging in a voice that squeaked past black skin, grabbing at skirts and braving the glassy
looks of fox lives
biting the driver, and yogurt generations reigned in her stomach among the sweets, Turkish
delights and cookies
I saw her stomach galloping the plains of sequined bikini bottoms on a pillow of air
and her lungs inhaling oneiric, silvery liquids and gold-thread representations
in the oriental, mystical hole of a bar and, lo, it was the season of assassins
and she danced in your heart, cartilage and bones, giving the effect of blue light
I saw her talking over a cognac, talking into a microphone, talking with her mouth full
and playing guitar in bed
and the talking glacier caps, glacial hemispheres
talking on and on about Marcuse, talking about Antonioni, Stratan, dyes and grammar, talking
in certitudes about the same labyrinth in hypertrophy
and I saw death unnatural, death made in a lab
and death that ignites like an oil well
and her unconscious rolls out through earwigs and bisulfite in hordes
over universities and statues and athenaeums and chains of lakes
and in front of the opera, reduces Enescu’s statue into a giant rattrap
and hides it under the chairs at the Tosca confectionary
I saw her black, flabby body eating the north-south metro line, razing earth
and hanging there like a sin spider from the web of sewerage
I saw death as a monkey dressed like a sailor
staring at me from the third deck through sad, red eyes
weighing on the chimpanzee encephalon, undeveloped, pedunculated
I saw her delousing for rubies around the pancreas and liver
I saw her carrying refrigerators, licking stamps and clipping together written-on pages
yawning without covering her mouth at sublime sunrises stinking of bromide and aphrodisiac
they peeled back my conscience, hidden under polyps and tonsils, with methylene blue
and I recognized her in the dimwit drawings on matchbooks…
paralogue of beauty, you used to know so many jokes.
and mother lined my pockets with memories from before war and marriage
and I let her hands, both dulled and sharpened, do a complicated operation on my brain
and a more complicated extraction of my heart.
long before the passage to downtown was built, winter came
and people were still swarming there underground, as if guided by the anticipation of a scent
and there the foreigners would pay on the terrace where the intercontinental hotel is now,
cigarettes lit
where embryonic kittens were groping down streets next to pastry shop steam
was I complicated? oh, bacteria came to me like to a shop or museum
the skin covering my skull was cooing the tired usurper’s semantic aura
and my ears were listening to the internal rapture gurgling
and joining the apocalyptic calamity of the boulevards with cinemas
pouting beauty, the garter belt of night unbinds orchestral fetish in sleepwalkers
the child I was, right now, ducking into a bosom,
his bangs make a brilliant slipcover draped over chairs and floor lamps
without a body, going into the bathroom barefoot
to cover blemishes in the mirror with the pinkish foam of after shave
and squeezing toothpaste out in the w/c of tile
looking directly into my eyes as the cerebral hemisphere flaps them quiet
and kind.
love, amor, erotic… Bauhaus architecture hooched up like daiquiri in champagne glasses
blood red tracings of all the lipstick ruj
she would be called a legacy and should give us the heraldic dementia of Mateiu Caragiale
and the universality of the Pişcu commune. But I think you prefer rather clonic motions
and the great, hysterical crisis
you prefer countless dresses and feelings fitting to your breasts
prefer the person never losing sight of your hypnotic figure, in his old, watery eyes
never in the aldehyde of twilight, never broken
in whose arms you’re brought to orgasm like a jelly fish of flowing humor and reflexes
who calms you, and keeps you,
and before your beautiful face, holds a mirror
to see yourself, moonstruck, smiling…
to see the little girl and young woman and whore and mother and electra and old biddy and
matron and virgin
lymphatic, sanguine, heartbroken and choleric and unchanged
death,
smiling…
the lunar eclipse stammered so badly the screen shattered, burying us in a rainbow of broken
glass
and the bricks at the Dîmboviţa mill were like an Atlantic fortress submerged
and we received desperate calls from the winter twilight outside in fists beating greatcoats on
our backs
directing us to the first cherub, first star, first vegetable…
there was nothing metaphysical: the coo of dump trucks, our intestines
decorating the winter tree with electric stars
oh, if the eyes of the tablecloth could speak to your bra
you, yourself, could throw purple cellophane balls down my sublingual hallways
we can love each other, we can praise each other, we make love, we can sleep together
we can touch each other in the cold of conscience, we can bite our cheeks
with lace molars
we can replace a spongy death, in fluorescent nothing, for a diamond
two hundred thousand carat death.